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Chapter One
Introduction
The Prison State and the
Lockdown of American Politics
To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.
—­G eorge Orwell
F
ifteen years ago , mass imprisonment was largely an invisible issue in the
United States. Since then, criticism of the country’s extraordinary incarceration rate has become widespread across the political spectrum. The huge
prison buildup of the past four decades has few ardent defenders today. But reforms to reduce the number of people in jail and prison have been remarkably
modest so far.
Meanwhile, a tenacious carceral state has sprouted in the shadows of mass imprisonment and has been extending its reach far beyond the prison gate. It includes not only the country’s vast archipelago of jails and prisons, but also the
far-­reaching and growing range of penal punishments and controls that lies in
the never-­never land between the prison gate and full citizenship. As it sunders
families and communities and radically reworks conceptions of democracy, rights,
and citizenship, the carceral state poses a formidable political and social challenge.
The reach of the carceral state today is truly breathtaking. It extends well beyond the estimated 2.2 million people sitting in jail or prison today in the United
States.1 It encompasses the more than eight million people—­or in one in twenty-­
three adults—­who are under some form of state control, including jail, prison,
probation, parole, community sanctions, drug courts, immigrant detention, and
other forms of government supervision.2 It also includes the millions of people
who are booked into jail each year—­perhaps nearly seven million—­and the estimated 7.5 percent of all adults who are felons or ex-­felons.3
The carceral state directly shapes, and in some cases deforms, the lives of tens of
millions of people who have never served a day in jail or prison or been arrested.
An estimated eight million minors—­or one in ten children—­have had an incarcerated parent. Two million young children currently have a mother or father serving
time in state or federal prison.4 Millions of people reside in neighborhoods and
communities that have been depopulated and upended as so many of their young
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2 | Chapter One
men and women have been sent away to prison during what should be the prime
of their lives. Hundreds of rural communities have chased after the illusion that
constructing a prison or jail will jump-­start their ailing economies.
The problem of the carceral state is no longer confined to the prison cell and
prison yard and to poor urban communities and minority groups—­if it ever was.
The U.S. penal system has grown so extensive that it has begun to metastasize.
It has altered how key governing institutions and public services and benefits
operate—­everything from elections to schools to public housing. The carceral
state also has begun to distort essential demographic, political, and socioeconomic databases, leading to misleading findings about trends in vital areas such
as economic growth, political participation, unemployment, poverty, and public
health.
The carceral state has been radically remaking conceptions of citizenship as it
creates a large and permanent group of political, economic, and social outcasts. It
has been cleaving off wide swaths of people in the United States from the promise
of the American Dream or “American Creed”—­the faith that everyone has an inalienable right to freedom, justice, and equal opportunities to get ahead, and that
everyone stands equal before the law.5 The political consequences of this are potentially explosive because the American Dream arguably has been the country’s
central ideology, serving as a kind of societal glue holding otherwise disparate
groups together.6
Millions have been condemned to “civil death,” denied core civil liberties and
social benefits because of a criminal conviction. An estimated six million people
have been disenfranchised either temporarily or permanently because of a criminal conviction. This is about 2.5 percent of the total U.S. voting age population, or
one in forty adults.7 Millions of Americans have been denied public benefits like
student loans, food stamps, and public housing because of their criminal records.
Likewise, owing to a prior run-­in with the law, many people are ineligible to receive state licenses for a range of occupations—­from hairdressing to palm reading to nursing. Many incarcerated mothers and fathers are at risk of having their
parental rights severed, sometimes after they have been behind bars for as little as
fifteen months.8
For those seeking to dismantle the carceral state, the key challenge is not trying
to determine what specific sentencing and other reforms would slash the number
of people in jail and prison. The real challenge is figuring out how to create a political environment that is more receptive to such reforms and how to make the
far-­reaching consequences of the carceral state into a leading political and public
policy issue.9
This book analyzes why the carceral state, with its growing number of outcasts,
remains so tenacious in the United States. It examines the shortcomings of the
dominant penal reform strategies and lays out an alternative path to dismantling
the carceral state. In doing so, I use the problem of the carceral state as a lens to
examine the wider pathologies that have captured American politics today and are
preventing the country from solving its most pressing problems.
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The Prison State | 3
The Leading Penal Reform Strategies
The ways in which elites, interest groups, the media, and social movements define
and frame an issue can powerfully influence not only public opinion but also public policy. Under certain circumstances, framing an issue in a new way can release
tremendous new forces that transform the public debate.10 Over the past decade
or so, the growing opposition to mass incarceration has tended to gravitate toward
two different poles, both of them inadequate in the face of these challenges.
One pole identifies racial disparities, racial discrimination, and institutional
racism as the front lines in the challenge to the carceral state. Michelle Alexander’s characterization of mass incarceration as “the new Jim Crow” exemplifies
this view.11 Alexander singles out the color-­blind racism of the new Jim Crow, especially as manifested in the war on drugs, as the major driver of the carceral state.
She contends that the new Jim Crow is in many ways a more challenging political
foe than the in-­your-­face racism of the old Jim Crow.
The other pole seeks to find a winning nonpartisan path out of mass incarceration by downplaying its stark racial causes and racial consequences. The emphasis
instead is on how the fiscal burden of the vast penal system is growing untenable. Here the imperative has been to find rational, cost-­effective, evidence-­based
alternatives for some offenders, primarily drug and other nonviolent offenders,
without jeopardizing public safety.
This is largely the stance of the Pew Center on the States, the Council of State
Governments, and the U.S. Department of Justice. They have joined together to
promote reentry programs and justice reinvestment schemes largely aimed at reducing the recidivism rates of ex-­offenders. Thanks to their work, the three R’s—­
reentry, justice reinvestment, and recidivism—­dominate discussions of penal reform in Washington, DC and in many state capitals. This approach is compatible
with the growing push to alter the public conversation about all sorts of social
problems by adopting a “practical tone” that avoids discussions of hot-­button issues like fairness between groups or the historical legacy of racism.12
The new Jim Crow and the fiscal imperative frames have made major contributions to our understanding of the carceral state and have pried open some important political space to challenge it. In particular, the contributions of Alexander’s
The New Jim Crow cannot be underestimated. No other book has been so vital in
making the problem of the carceral state starkly visible to the wider public and in
rallying members of disadvantaged communities and other groups to take on the
project of dismantling it.
But these two frames also have some shortcomings. They have contributed to
some public misperceptions about the relationship between crime and punishment and about who is being sent to prison and why. This has fostered some misguided penal reform efforts. Furthermore, these two frames are unlikely to germinate and sustain the broad political movement necessary to dramatically reduce
the number of people in jail and prison or ameliorate the many ways in which the
carceral state has deformed U.S. society and political institutions.
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4 | Chapter One
Race and the Carceral State
Race matters, and it matters profoundly in any discussion of how to dismantle
the carceral state. But, as in the case of other major shifts in public policy and
American political development, “the racial character of the contemporary system
is more than just a legacy of our troubled past.”13 Racial and other disquieting disparities do not automatically flow from that troubled past. They are the product of
politics—­of how key politicians, other public figures, interest groups, the media,
and social movements choose to draw from that past, reinvent that past, and discard pieces of the past as they adjust their political strategies to the political, social,
and economic realities of the present. In the process, they create new institutional
and political arrangements that inscribe the past in new ways onto the present. As
Michelle Alexander so persuasively, eloquently, and mournfully demonstrates in
The New Jim Crow, the emergence of color-­blind racism in the post–­civil rights
era is one such adaptation that poses a major obstacle to dismantling the carceral
state. But there are others.
Building on Alexander’s work, I identify some other underlying political, economic, and social factors that spark and sustain such punitive policies not only for
certain blacks, but also for certain whites, Latinos, immigrants, and members of
other demographic groups. Bluntly stated, the United States would still have an
incarceration crisis even if African Americans were sent to prison and jail at “only”
the rate at which whites in the United States are currently locked up, as shown in
figure 1.1 and elaborated in chapter 6.
A century ago, the massive disenfranchisement of blacks at the dawn of the Jim
Crow era through the poll tax, literacy tests, and violent intimidation overshadowed the vast and simultaneous disenfranchisement of poor whites that undermined the growth of the Populist movement in the South. Likewise, the hyper-­
incarceration of black men today has overshadowed the growing incarceration
rates of poor whites, Latinos, immigrants, and women. Many political and policy
debates over the carceral state remain mired in viewing this as primarily a black-­
white issue. Even “Latino civil rights and advocacy organizations have yet to fully
understand the devastating effects of a discriminatory criminal justice system on
Latino life,” explains one knowledgeable observer.14
The carceral state has disproportionately hurt African American men. But it
also has been targeting a rising number of people from other historically disadvantaged groups. The United States, with just 5 percent of the world’s population,
incarcerates almost one-­third of the 625,000 women and girls confined to jails
and prisons worldwide.15 In a major shift, Hispanics now constitute 35 percent
of all federal prisoners, making them the largest ethnic or racial group in the
federal prison system.16 This is a consequence of the escalation in immigration
raids and prosecutions for immigration violations, as well as the relative drop in
federal prosecutions of certain other crimes, including gun trafficking, corruption,
organized crime, and white-­collar crime (see figure 10.2, p. 225). Since the 1990s,
black-­white disparities in incarceration have been falling. Some of this decline is
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Other
U.S.
The Prison State | 5
Blacks*
Hispanics
Whites*
Black males*
Hispanic males
White males*
Black females*
Hispanic females
White females*
Total
400
316
265
159
153
117
111
96
94
85
78
73
58
32
0
4749
1822
708
333
142
91
Russia
Georgia
South Africa
Singapore
Spain
England and Wales
Canada
Italy
France
Netherlands
Germany
Sweden
Norway
Japan
India
2285
979
730
568
547
500
1,000
1,500
2,000
2,500
3,000
3,500
4,000
4,500
Rate (per 100,000 people)
Figure 1.1. Incarceration Rates, Select Countries and Groups
* Excludes people of Hispanic or Latino origin
Sources: See p. 338, n. 16; Roy Walmsley, “World Prison Population List,” 9th ed. (London:
King’s College, International Centre for Prison Studies, May 2011), http://www.kcl.ac.uk
/depst/law/research/icps/downloads/wppl-8th_41.pdf (retrieved February 11, 2014).
likely the result of changes in the way the U.S. Department of Justice enumerates Hispanic inmates, but some of the decline appears to be real.17 Poor whites,
Hispanics, and women have been a booming growth area for the carceral state, as
discussed in chapters 6 and 10. But so far these other groups and their advocates
have not been central to the growing debate over penal reform.
Alexander identifies ostensibly color-­blind drug laws and law enforcement policies as the main culprit in mass incarceration today. But drug offenders comprise
only about 20 percent of offenders in state prisons, or about the same proportion
as property offenders. People whose primary offense was a violent one comprise
about half of all state inmates. Even if we could release all drug offenders today,
without other major changes in U.S. laws and penal policies and practices, the
United States would continue to be the world’s warden, and a stint in prison or
jail would continue to be a rite of passage for many African Americans. Although
ending the war on drugs would not make a major dent in the overall prison population, it could reduce considerably the number of incarcerated women, especially
African American women. Women, who have been the fastest growing segment of
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5,000
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6 | Chapter One
the prison population, are much more likely than male inmates to be serving time
for a drug offense.18 An end to the war on drugs would also likely have a major
impact on the federal prison population, since drug offenders constitute about half
of all federal inmates.19
As the war on crime has been winding down on some fronts, it has been ratcheting up on new ones. With changes in drug policies in some urban areas, the
proportion of blacks swept up in the war on drugs has been declining, as discussed
in chapter 6. But a new front in the war on drugs has opened up in rural, predominantly white areas that reportedly are facing the scourge of methamphetamine
labs, prescription drug abuse, and heroin. Furthermore, since the 1990s, U.S. politicians and policy makers have been laying the institutional and political groundwork for a large-­scale war against sex offenders, as discussed in chapter 9. The
wider public has been a willing conscript in this new war, which has eerie parallels
with the origins and development of the war on drugs four decades ago. The wave
of draconian sex offender laws has struck hardest at older white men.
The carceral state also has expanded its capacity to apprehend, detain, punish, and deport immigrants, as elaborated in chapter 10. It has done so partly
by retrofitting the hard-­line politics, policies, and tactics that fueled the prison
boom of the 1980s and 1990s and by creating new institutions that dissolve the
distinction between law enforcement and immigration enforcement. The growing criminalization of immigration enforcement beginning in the 1980s and the
rapid expansion of the immigrant detention system are creating a “crimmigration
crisis.”20
The historical evidence presented by Alexander and many others is overwhelming that racial animus and the quest to preserve white supremacy have been central factors in American political development, including the development of the
U.S. criminal justice system.21 But as the racial order continues to invent new ways
to target blacks, it has generated punitive policies and practices that migrate to
other dispossessed groups in the United States. In the words of James Q. Whitman,
the U.S. penal system has a strong tendency to “level down.” The much-­heralded
“liberal” features of American political culture ironically have helped to render the
U.S. penal system harsher, more degrading, and less forgiving as it extends a brute
egalitarianism across the board.22
The United States is exceptional not only because it locks up so many people
but also because brutal, dehumanizing practices and conditions are endemic to
many U.S. jails and prisons, whether they are predominantly black, predominantly
white, or mostly multiracial and multiethnic. The wider public has a history of
being largely indifferent to prison conditions “even when the victims were white
men.”23 The massive increase in the number of inmates since the 1970s has overwhelmed the capacity of many correctional authorities “to safely and humanely
house and administer them,” as discussed in chapter 2.24 Today we have what one
critic calls “mass imprisonment on the cheap.”25 The majority of U.S. prisons and
many jails “hold more people than they can deal with safely and effectively, creating a degree of disorder and tension almost certain to erupt in violence,” a national
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The Prison State | 7
blue-­ribbon commission concluded in 2006.26 Resource constraints alone do not
explain why the prison buildup coincided with a new “mean season” in corrections.27 As the “rehabilitative ideal” was cast out in the 1970s, more prisoners were
depicted as brutal, hardened criminals who were neither deserving of nor capable
of rehabilitation and redemption.28
Right on Crime?
Alexander and many other critics who focus on the racial disparities of the carceral state acknowledge that class, gender, ethnicity, and other factors complicate
any discussion of race and mass incarceration but do not develop this point.29 The
intense focus on the racial dimension of the carceral state sometimes obscures the
importance of other factors in determining who is punished and for what. In particular, it obscures how certain shifts in the wider political economy pose major
impediments to the emergence of a successful broad-­based political movement to
dismantle the carceral state. Key economic factors discussed in this book include
deep structural changes in the job market, growing income and other inequalities,
the escalating political assault on the public sector and organized labor, and the
economic decline of wide swaths of urban and rural America. A central theme is
how the deep penetration of neoliberalism into nearly all aspects of U.S. public
policy and politics is fostering economic and political inequalities and eroding
democratic institutions.
The predominant economic frameworks employed in public discussions of the
carceral state tend to fall into one of two other categories. On the one hand—­
usually the left hand—­are believers in the prison-­industrial complex. They contend that the carceral state is largely the consequence of vested economic interests
that have captured and corrupted penal policy. For some of these critics, denunciation of the awesome power of the prison-­industrial complex substitutes for careful
analysis of the specific, complex, and shifting political, economic, and institutional
factors that sustain the carceral state and that deeply complicate the politics of
penal reform.30
On the other hand is the elite bipartisan coalition that has been congealing
around the purported fiscal burden of mass imprisonment. The Great Recession
has raised many expectations that the United States will begin closing many of its
jails and prisons because it can no longer afford to keep so many people locked up.
Publications and institutions spanning the political spectrum, from the libertarian Reason magazine and Cato Institute to the left-­leaning Nation and American
Prospect, have embraced framing the problem of the carceral state as primarily a
dollars-­and-­cents issue that begs for a bipartisan solution.31 They contend that the
United States can do more to promote public safety and save money by reducing
its reliance on prisons and by ending expensive, misguided criminal justice adventures like the war on drugs.
A group of brand-­
name conservatives, including Newt Gingrich, Grover
Norquist, and Edwin Meese III, have joined Right on Crime, a national initiative
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8 | Chapter One
led by the Texas Public Policy Foundation, one of the nation’s leading state-­based
conservative think tanks.32 This initiative aims to better align the conservative
agenda on criminal justice reform with traditional conservative concerns about
limited government, individual liberty, and free enterprise.33 When it launched a
new campaign against mass incarceration in spring 2011, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the country’s foremost
identity-­based civil rights organization, prominently featured its alliance with
the Right on Crime coalition. This prompted a spate of headlines proclaiming
“NAACP Joins with Gingrich in Urging Prison Reform.”34
Alliances like these have bolstered a wave of optimism that the country is finally
ready to enact major reforms to reduce the incarceration rate. The penal optimists
point to the slew of penal reforms enacted over the past decade or so. These include measures to expand the use of alternative sentences and drug courts, loosen
restrictions on parole eligibility, reduce revocations of parole and probation for
minor infractions, and dial down the war on drugs (most notably, by legalizing
or decriminalizing marijuana possession and reducing mandatory minimums for
other drug offenses).35 They note that dozens of states have cut their corrections
budgets in recent years, and many have closed or considered closing penal facilities to save money.36 They also note that in 2009, the total number of inmates in
state prisons dipped for the first time since 1972 and has continued to fall since
then.
This optimism that we are at the beginning of the end of the carceral state because the fiscal costs have become too high to sustain is unwarranted for several
reasons. Below the surface of the apparent left-­right consensus on the fiscal imperative to reduce the number of people in prison or jail are enormous differences
over key issues, including juvenile justice reform, indigent defense, executive
clemency, the privatization of corrections, and the abuse of civil forfeiture laws,
to name just a few.37 Furthermore, while the total number of people in U.S. jails
and prisons has largely stabilized since the onset of the Great Recession, no major
contraction appears in sight. The U.S. incarceration rate of 730 per 100,000 is still
the highest in the world and rivals the estimated rate that citizens of the Soviet
Union were being sent to the gulags during the final years of Stalin’s rule in the
early 1950s (see figure 1.1).38
Between 2009 and 2012, the total inmate population in the United States fell by
just 2.5 percent, or 56,500 people.39 California, which has been under enormous
political and legal pressure to reduce its prison population thanks to the 2011
Brown v. Plata decision, accounts for about 75 percent of this drop.40 The number
of inmates has continued to grow in about half of the states while declining slightly
in the other half.41 Meanwhile, the federal prison population has continued to gallop along at a brisk pace, as has the number of immigrants detained by the federal
government. In 2011, the Department of Justice projected that by 2018 the federal
prison population would grow by nearly 12 percent.42
It is unlikely that the fiscal and economic burden will single-­handedly unhinge
the carceral state, even in the wake of the wrenching economic upheavals and
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The Prison State | 9
distress brought on by the 2008 financial crisis and the Great Recession. Indeed,
these upheavals could spur yet another round of get-­tough policies, as elaborated
in chapter 2. Despite the prison-­building boom, corrections costs remain a relatively small component of state expenditures. Although corrections has been one
of the fastest growing items in state budgets, second only to Medicaid, it still lags
far behind what states spend on other sectors. In fiscal 2010, state expenditures on
corrections totaled $48.5 billion, or less than 3 percent of the nearly $2 trillion in
total state expenditures. This is less than half of what states spend on highways.43
Despite substantial increases over the last two decades in the budget for the federal
Bureau of Prisons, its nearly $7 billion budget in fiscal 2013 was truly a drop in the
bucket of total federal expenditures.
Most prison costs are fixed and are not easily cut. The only way to seriously
reduce spending on corrections is to shut down penal facilities and lay off correctional staff. Faced with powerful interests that profit politically and economically
from mass imprisonment, states (with a few notable exceptions like New York
State) have been making largely symbolic cuts that do not significantly reduce the
incarcerated population or save much money.44 But they do render life in prison
and life after prison leaner and meaner, as detailed in chapter 2. Homicides, assaults, and other acts of violence appear to be on the rise in federal penitentiaries
and in some state prisons as staff positions go unfilled due to budget cuts.45 Thirty-­
six of forty-­four states surveyed in the wake of the Great Recession reported cuts
in corrections staffing, and half said that they had eliminated or reduced programs
for inmates. Several states reported that they had cut back on health services, and
nearly a third reported that they had cut back on food services.46
Levying fees for meals, housing, and visits to the doctor on people serving
time is becoming more common. Politicians in Des Moines, Iowa even considered charging inmates for toilet paper to save a couple of thousand dollars each
year.47 Some local jails have stopped providing underwear to inmates, who must
now purchase it themselves from the facility’s commissary or go without if they
are too indigent. As Donald Leach, a former vice president of the American Jail
Association, quipped, “Inmates don’t have a constitutional right to underwear.”48
Or to tampons or sanitary napkins, which many female inmates must purchase
on their own from the prison commissary or else fashion crude substitutes from
toilet paper.
The budget deficit hysteria of the past few years has helped foster what some are
calling a new war on the poor with the criminalization of poverty, as discussed in
chapter 2.49 Budget cuts are compromising the activities of the court system and
legal services for the poor today. Justice delayed is increasingly justice denied as
judges and courthouses go on furloughs, judgeships remain vacant to save money,
and trials are postponed. As the number of people arrested and convicted and the
severity of punishments escalated over the past four decades, legal aid budgets did
not keep pace and in many cases actually declined. “[I]t is better to be rich and
guilty than poor and innocent” in America today, lamented Stephen Bright of the
Southern Center for Human Rights in summing up the sorry state of legal services
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10 | Chapter One
for the poor.50 In February 2012, Attorney General Eric Holder denounced the indigent defense crisis facing the United States.51 A year later, the fiftieth anniversary
of the landmark Gideon v. Wainwright decision upholding the right to counsel for
indigent defendants was cause not for celebration but for widespread lament. As
one observer noted on the anniversary, “[T]here is no meaningful right to counsel for Americans too poor to afford their own attorney.”52 The 2013 sequestration and other recent budget cuts have pushed legal services for the poor past the
breaking point in many jurisdictions.53
As judicial budgets contract, judges have become exceptionally aggressive about
collecting fines and fees. Poor people who cannot pay these off are being sent to
jail, a practice of dubious constitutionality. The number of ordinances against the
poor for actions such as vagrancy, panhandling, and sleeping on the pavement has
been rising over the last decade. At the same time that poverty is being criminalized, states and the federal government have been slashing social services for the
poor, which will likely result in more people ending up in prison.
Neoliberalism and the Carceral State
The fiscal imperative argument is inattentive to how the wider U.S. political economy shapes the contours of the carceral state and the political possibilities to dismantle it. Research that situates the U.S. carceral state in a comparative framework suggests that fundamental differences in how the polity and economy are
organized explain vast differences in penal policy among industrialized countries.
Nicola Lacey and others argue that countries with neoliberal, first-­past-­the-­post
electoral systems (notably the United States and Britain) create a reinforcing political and economic environment that fosters more punitive and exclusionary penal
policies. Countries that have coordinated market economics and more consensual electoral systems with proportional representation (such as Germany) tend
to be less punitive because they are more conducive to inclusionary and welfarist
policies.54
Such macro-­level analyses of political and economic differences to explain
cross-­national differences in penal policy are extremely revealing. But they come
at the cost of more fine-­grained understandings of the specific political, economic,
and institutional factors that shape penal policy at a specific moment in a specific
place. For all their considerable strengths, these bird’s eye views are less helpful in
explaining important swings in punishment in a single country over time or important variations in punitiveness and penal policy in a single country at a given
moment. This is a problem particularly in the case of the United States, which has
a federal system of government in which criminal justice policy is primarily forged
at the state and local levels; each state operates its own prison system; and counties,
not states, run most of the jails.
The construction of such an expansive and unforgiving carceral state in the
United States is a national phenomenon that has left no state untouched. All fifty
states have seen their incarceration rates explode since the 1970s. But the state-­
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The Prison State | 11
level variation in incarceration rates is still enormous, far greater than what exists
across Western Europe. Rates range from a high of more than 1,600 per 100,000
people in Louisiana to a low of about 200 per 100,000 in Rhode Island (see fig­
ure 1.2). This great variation and the fact that crime control in the United States
is primarily a local and state function, not a federal one, suggest that local, state,
and perhaps regional factors might help explain U.S. penal policies. Trying to unravel why the carceral state has been more extensive, abusive, and degrading in
some states than others is a growing and promising area of research. In order to
understand the political possibilities for dismantling the carceral state, we need a
more specific understanding of developments on the ground, especially how the
neoliberal turn in public policy got filtered through specific electoral, party, and
other institutional developments and arrangements at the local and state levels.
African Americans have been and remain central targets of the carceral state
and without question have been disproportionately harmed by it. But more members of other groups are finding themselves economically and politically disenfranchised and socially marginalized as a new political and economic order takes
hold and the carceral state expands its reach. A defining feature of that new order
is the onslaught of neoliberalism since the 1970s, which has widened the gap between the political and economic haves and the political and economic have-­nots.
The turn toward neoliberalism has been a growing area of political and scholarly interest. But as Loïc Wacquant notes, “[N]eoliberalism is an elusive and contested notion, a hybrid term awkwardly suspended between the lay idiom of political debate and the technical terminology of social science.”55 Neoliberalism is
an ideology and package of policies that deify low taxes, macroeconomic stabilization (through low inflation and low public debt), financial and trade deregulation, privatization of public assets and services, and the retrenchment of the
welfare state. The neoliberal agenda shuns Keynesianism, a comprehensive state-­
supported safety net, and strong labor unions. Neoliberalism has long rested on
privatizing failure and denigrating the role of government to solve economic and
social problems.56
Today, the neoliberal agenda rests on a powerful consensus among political
elites of the two major political parties that the country’s budget deficits are the
preeminent domestic threats to its economic and political future. This unwarranted budget deficit hysteria—­or what Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz calls “deficit fetishism”—­has asphyxiated the political imagination, not just with respect to
mass incarceration but also to many other pressing social and economic problems,
such as the lack of universal health care and good public schools for all.57 These
developments have put a premium on pursuing short-­term goals couched in budget deficit terms and emphasizing individualized and privatized solutions over
government-­led ones among the leadership of both parties.58
Neoliberalism is a defining global trend. However, it has taken root more
quickly in some countries and jurisdictions than others and has captured some
social and economic policies faster than others. The specific institutional and political context helps explain why. Wacquant focuses primarily on the imposition of
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State
Louisiana
Mississippi
Georgia
Alabama
Oklahoma
Texas
Kentucky
Florida
Arizona
Tennessee
Virginia
Idaho
Nevada
New Mexico
South Carolina
Indiana
Arkansas
Missouri
Colorado
Wyoming
Pennsylvania
Michigan
South Dakota
Wisconsin
Ohio
West Virginia
Montana
Maryland
California
Kansas
Oregon
North Carolina
Illinois
Utah
New Jersey
Washington
Delaware
New York
Nebraska
Iowa
Alaska
Massachusetts
North Dakota
New Hampshire
Connecticut
Minnesota
Hawaii
Maine
Vermont
Rhode Island
0
200
400
600
800
1,000
1,200
1,400
1,600
1,800
Incarceration rate (per 100,000 residents)
Figure 1.2. State by State Incarceration Rates, 2012
Source: The Sentencing Project, “Interactive Map: Total Corrections Population,” http://
www.sentencingproject.org/map/map.cfm#map (retrieved March 13, 2014). Includes both
jail and prison populations. Data from earlier years used when 2012 data were not
available.
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The Prison State | 13
neoliberalism at the national and international levels. But neoliberalism operates
at multiple levels of government and in multiple political spheres. In short, it is
important to understand how neoliberalism operates “in the trenches.”59
Wacquant argues that the penal policies that flow from neoliberalism have been
“remarkably discriminating” as they have targeted the poor and disadvantaged
while leaving the middle and upper classes “largely spared.”60 That may have been
true in the early decades of the prison buildup, but it is no longer true today. The
poor and members of other disadvantaged groups certainly continue to bear the
brunt of U.S. penal policies. But the carceral state has grown so expansive that it
now deeply penetrates wide swaths of political, economic, and social life in the
United States. In their case study of welfare reform, Joe Soss, Richard C. Fording,
and Sanford F. Schram show how neoliberalism “de-­democratizes the citizenry in
far-­reaching ways.”61 This is even truer in the case of neoliberalism and the carceral
state, as elaborated in chapter 11 and elsewhere in this book. In short, there are no
longer six degrees of separation from the carceral state for many Americans.
Neoliberalism in theory and neoliberalism in practice are fraught with contradictions, as Bernard Harcourt demonstrates in his excavation of the deep philosophical and political origins of neoliberalism stretching back to the eighteenth
century.62 Neoliberalism’s political vitality has long depended on political sleights
of hand that keep those contradictions out of the public eye and out of the public
debate. How else could such a massive and costly expansion of the penal system
take place at a time when calls for shrinking the government and slashing taxes
so dominated the political landscape (as discussed in chapter 3)? In the case of
welfare reform, neoliberalism has failed abysmally on its own terms. It ushered in
a promiscuous privatization that fostered corruption and fraud without reducing
the poverty rate.63
As shown in the coming chapters, neoliberalism in penal policy is also failing
on its own terms. The state has not retreated. A higher proportion of the population is under its direct control through prison, jail, probation, parole, and commu­
nity service than at any time in U.S. history. Furthermore, the government’s penal,
welfare, social service, surveillance, governing, economic, and political functions
have become deeply entangled in ways that are creating troubling gradations of
citizenship and belonging. In addition, these functions are growing more enmeshed with the private sector, which is even less transparent and accountable
than the public sector. Taken together, these developments are upending the lives
of enormous swaths of people in the United States, most of whom have never spent
a day in jail or prison. They mark the emergence of the carceral state and raise
troubling questions about the vitality of U.S. democracy and the legitimacy of the
new economic and political order.
Developments in penal policy cannot be understood separately from wider
developments in economic and social policy. Wacquant contends that mass incarceration was a political response to contain real and perceived fears of urban
disorder and unrest as the Fordist model of industrial production disintegrated
and neoliberalism took hold.64 But, as shown in chapter 7, the neoliberal punitive
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14 | Chapter One
turn was not just a response to the economic and political disorders of the 1960s
and 1970s. It was deeply conditioned by the political struggles in the 1940s and
1950s over law and order and civil rights. It also was deeply conditioned by the
reconfigurations of black politics and the broader political terrain with the demise
of the civil rights and Black Power movements.
Much of the work on neoliberalism is not attentive enough to the roles of race,
gender, and ethnicity in shaping economic policies.65 Likewise, much of the literature on race is inattentive to how the sinews of the political economy shape policy
and politics. The U.S. version of neoliberalism is heavily race-­inflected, Michael
Dawson argues. As neoliberalism restructures the U.S. economy, it “has sharpened
already existing class cleavages, further undermining the myth of a ‘monolithic’
black community, and by extension making even more difficult the task of building unified black political movements.”66 This helps explain why organized opposition to the carceral state from African Americans has been so muted or ineffective
until recently, as elaborated in chapters 6 and 7.
Carceral Clawback
The construction of the carceral state was the result of a complex set of historical,
institutional, and political developments. No single factor explains its rise, and
no single factor will bring about its demise. Mounting fiscal pressures will not be
enough on their own to spur communities, states, and the federal government to
make deep and lasting cuts in their prison and jail populations. It was mistakenly
assumed four decades ago that shared disillusionment on the right and the left
with indeterminate sentences and prison rehabilitation programs would shrink
the inmate population. Instead, it exploded. The “race to incarcerate” began in the
1970s at a time when states faced dire financial straits. It persisted over the next
four decades despite wide fluctuations in the crime rate, public opinion, and the
economy.67
Several factors help explain why “carceral clawback” is so tenacious.68 Prisons
are incredibly “resilient, flexible, and enabling institutions that can resist, incorporate, redefine, and absorb critical discourse.”69 Moreover, as the carceral state has
grown, so has the political clout and political acumen of groups, institutions, and
organizations with vested economic interests in maintaining the world’s largest
penal system. They include prison guards’ unions, state departments of corrections, law enforcement groups, the private corrections industry, and the financial
firms that devise bonds and other mechanisms to fund the carceral state. These
vested interests were not necessarily the main catalysts for the emergence of the
carceral state, but they represent major impediments to reducing the prison population today and reining in the carceral state, as elaborated in chapter 3.
Furthermore, opponents of the carceral state have been poorly positioned to
challenge these vested interests. It is not just a question of gross disparities in political resources that disadvantages them. With their single-­minded focus on mobilizing around a particular criminal justice issue, such as opposition to the death
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The Prison State | 15
penalty, some advocacy groups have failed to see how their actions impinge on the
broader politics of penal reform.70 Another political challenge is that the development of the carceral state coincided with new patterns of racial inequality that
have important implications for the politics of crime and punishment. Notably,
these developments have greatly enhanced the public policing power of African
American elites and partly explain their relative silence on the question of mass
incarceration and the growth of the carceral state until recently. They also help
explain why some leading identity-­based civil rights and other organizations have
been slow to mobilize against the carceral state, as discussed in chapters 6 and 7.
Many of the harshest critics of mass incarceration talk about the need to forge
a broader social or political movement to bring down the carceral state. However,
they generally have not inserted their analyses of the pathologies of the carceral
state into a wider and more nuanced understanding of the main economic, political, and social currents shaping the United States today and thus the possibilities
for penal reform. In short, “many progressives have failed to update their reform
concerns and advocacy in light of twenty-­first century realities.”71 One of those key
realities is the tenacity of neoliberalism in American politics.
The broader political and economic environment helps determine whether politicians, other public figures, interest groups, and organizations lean more toward
individual or structural explanations and solutions for major public problems. Individual explanations that stress personal responsibility have continued to trump
structural ones in discussions of crime, punishment, and penal reform, thus reinforcing the neoliberal slant in penal policy. Several factors elaborated in this book
help explain why. They include the emergence of color-­blind racism in the wake
of the civil rights movement, as Alexander argues; widening class, educational,
and residential differences among blacks; important shifts in the electorate and in
the political parties; and the organizational impediments to securing meaningful
representation for the most disadvantaged groups in advocacy organizations dedicated to economic and social justice.
The obsessive pursuit of short-­term goals in penal policy in service to budget
deficit concerns has crowded out more ambitious goals. As politicians and policy
makers pursue reentry and justice reinvestment schemes, they have left off the
table any serious discussion of ameliorating the structural causes of high concentrations of crime and poverty in certain communities. Reducing the imprisonment rate in state and federal prisons to its historical norm of 120 to 130 inmates
per 100,000 people—­which would be about one-­quarter of the current imprisonment rate—­is off the table (see figure 1.3). So is a relatively more modest goal like
cutting the incarceration rate for jails and prisons in half, to about 350 per 100,000.
This would still be an extraordinarily high rate compared to the rates of other
Western countries (see figure 1.1). But there is an even larger problem with this
strategy, as discussed in chapters 4 and 5. The dogged pursuit of the three R’s—­that
is, reentry, justice reinvestment, and reducing the recidivism rate—­may actually
be coming at the cost of fortifying both the carceral state and the sharp right turn
in American politics over the long term. This is a sadly familiar historical pattern.
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900
800
700
600
500
400
300
200
100
0
Prison and jail
Prison only
19
2
19 5
3
19 0
3
19 5
4
19 0
4
19 5
5
19 0
5
19 5
6
19 0
6
19 5
7
19 0
7
19 5
8
19 0
8
19 5
9
19 0
9
20 5
0
20 0
0
20 5
10
Rate (per 100,000 residents)
16 | Chapter One
Year
Figure 1.3. U.S. Imprisonment and Incarceration Rates, 1925–­2011
Source: Courtesy of Bruce Western, analyses for Jeremy Travis, Bruce Western, and Steve
Redburn, eds., The Growth of Incarceration in the United States: Exploring Causes and
Consequences (Washington, DC: National Academies Press, 2014), 35, fig. 2.1 and 421–­22,
appendix B.
Many previous bursts of penal reform optimism ended up shifting penal policies
in a more punitive direction.
Stumbling on the Road to Reform
Major shifts in public policy often have unintended negative consequences, and
penal policy is no exception. The road to a just criminal justice system is littered
with bursts of optimism that ended up yielding a sharp right turn in penal policy.
More than half a century of political agitation finally brought about bans on the
convict-­leasing system throughout much of the South by the 1920s.72 But the state-­
run chain gangs and penal farms that replaced the brutal and corrupt practice of
leasing out convicts to the highest bidder, who often worked them to death’s door
to turn a profit, became enduring symbols of “southern backwardness, brutality,
and racism.”73 As Robert Perkinson wryly observes, “Strange as it seems, the chain
gang, in which thousands of prisoners, most of them black, were loaded onto cattle
trucks and carted around the state to pound rocks and shovel dirt, was celebrated
as a humanitarian advance.”74
Moments of apparent left-­right convergence on penal policy are fraught with
possibility and peril. Growing disillusionment on the left and right with rehabilitation and judicial discretion in the 1970s provided a huge political opening for conservatives to move penal policy in a more punitive direction, partly because this
disillusionment coincided with a spike in crime rates.75 Indeterminate sentences
and parole boards were cast out at the federal level and in many states. Tough
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The Prison State | 17
mandatory and advisory sentencing guidelines, and harsh mandatory minimum,
habitual offender, and determinate sentencing statutes replaced them. At the federal level, a highly politicized sentencing commission was established that leaned
toward prosecutors and increasingly favored mandatory over advisory sentencing
guidelines. Federal judges, who initially overwhelmingly opposed the guidelines,
ended up slavishly following them in many cases.76
Like earlier bursts of penal reform, the three-­R approach might actually entrench the carceral state even further over the long run. Discussions of justice
reinvestment, recidivism, and reentry exemplify how the language and techniques
of cost-­benefit analysis have come to dominate mainstream conceptions of penal
reform.77 This is politically perilous for several reasons.
As discussed in chapters 4 and 5, evaluating each penal reform primarily by
putting it on the evidence-­based, cost-­benefit scales to determine whether it reduces crime while saving public money reinforces the tight linkage in the public
mind between punishment and crime. It is at odds with some of the most compelling research findings of the last decade or so about the relationship between punishment and crime. We have long known that crime rates move up and down quite
independently of punishment practices. More recent research has helped pinpoint
the precise relationship between incarceration rates and crime rates.78 A 2014 National Research Council study concluded that the “increase in incarceration may
have caused a decrease in crime, but the magnitude is highly uncertain and the
results of most studies suggest it was unlikely to have been large.”79
Recasting the problem of mass incarceration in econometric or cost-­benefit
language is problematic in many ways. It does little to challenge the excessively
punitive rhetoric that has left such a pernicious mark on penal policy over the last
half century. It also is no match for the considerable economic interests that are
now deeply invested in the perpetuation of the carceral state. Furthermore, it constricts the political space to challenge penal policies and practices on social justice
or human rights grounds. Among elite policy makers and the wider public, creating a safe, healthy, and humane penal system is generally not considered a credible
and desirable public policy goal on its own. This goal has to be linked somehow to
enhancing public safety and saving public money.
Encased in a shell of evidence-­based research, the three-­R approach is broadly
seen as a way to wring politics out of penal reform. The aim is to devise penal
reforms that attract overwhelming bipartisan consensus. But this goal comes at
a high cost. It leaves largely unchallenged and unquestioned the political calculations and interests that built the carceral state in the first place. The narrow emphasis on evidence-­based research related to recidivism fosters the impression that the
birth of the carceral state was the result of bad or nonexistent research rather than
bad politics or bad policy.
No wonder then that ending this vast public policy experiment with mass incarceration is not considered a worthy goal in and of itself. Calls to slash the U.S. incarceration rate to bring it more in line with its historic levels and with the incarceration rates of other Western countries are viewed as wildly utopian or dangerously
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18 | Chapter One
radical. This is so despite the pile of evidence-­based research that the relationship
between punishment practices and public safety is a loose one at best.
Alarmed by the noxious consequences of the hyper-­politicization of criminal
justice policy-­making since the 1970s, experts on crime and punishment generally have recoiled from paying serious attention to the ways in which the political
context influences all aspects of crime and punishment.80 But as David Bazelon,
the chief judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington, DC, warned more than
three decades ago, “[P]olitics is at the heart of American criminology.”81 Many experts in this area have sought refuge in producing state-­of-­the-­art, ostensibly apolitical, evidence-­based research centered largely on how to help government agencies or other groups reduce crime. Such a “narrowly instrumental focus appears to
forget that in a liberal democracy it matters not only that crime is prevented and
detected, but also how that happens.”82 Ian Loader and Richard Sparks rightfully
beseech these experts to recognize that all aspects of crime and punishment are
inherently political, for they are central to how we think about what constitutes a
good and fair society.83 In short, crime control strategies are profoundly political
because they both reflect and direct the distribution of power in society.84
Framing solutions to the problem of the carceral state primarily in “neutral,”
scientific, and nonpartisan language ends up ceding important political ground,
rendering reforms to dismantle the carceral state vulnerable to resurgent law-­and-­
order rhetoric. Moreover, since “cost savings and lower reoffending rates are presented as ends in themselves—­that are somehow separate from thornier matters of
human rights, morality, or justice—­what is to protect against practices that might
be extremely harsh, but reduce overheads or recidivism?”85
The three-­R approach to limited penal reform has been unfolding alongside a
growing push to banish certain people, in some cases permanently, including lifers, immigrants, and people convicted of violent or sexual offenses, as discussed
in chapters 8, 9, and 10. These simultaneous and seemingly contradictory gestures
are really two sides of the same coin. Both approaches are manifestations of what
some sociologists characterize as the “death of the social” with the rise of neoliberalism and globalization and the devolution of the government.86 With the “death
of the social,” problems like crime, poverty, mass unemployment, and mass incarceration are no longer seen as having fundamental structural causes that can be
ameliorated by policies and resources mobilized by the state. Rather, these problems are regarded “as either the product of chance or individual action.”87 State
actors and state agencies are considered part of the problem rather than part of the
solution. As such, any quest to develop visionary state-­led social and economic
policies that seek to address the growing inequalities in the United States is considered politically impolitic.
Instead, the focus is on devising micro-interventions at the local and community levels to change the behavior of individuals. The delegated engineers for these
micro-interventions are private-­sector, nonprofit, or state actors who are specialists
in a very particular area—­like substance abuse or anger management or résumé
writing.88 In short, we live in an oxymoronic age of DIY—­that is, do-­it-­yourself—­
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The Prison State | 19
social policies. Those individuals deemed unable or unwilling to change must be
banished—­either to the prison or to the prison beyond the prison. Why? Because
even though local communities have been valorized as the primary sites of political, social, and economic sustenance, they also are regarded as fragile bulwarks
in the face of all the turmoil and anxiety wrought by neoliberalism, globalization,
and the coming of the white minority in U.S. politics.89
The current economic crisis certainly presents an opportunity to redirect U.S.
penal policy that opponents of the prison boom should certainly exploit. But the
recidivism-­reinvestment-­reentry model of penal reform is not likely to result in
a major retrenchment of the carceral state. Since the pernicious politics that gave
birth to the carceral state remain fundamentally unchallenged, another burst of
punitive law-­and-­order policy-­making remains an imminent threat. The country’s
current economic malaise does not provide much of a firewall against that. Indeed,
for a variety of reasons, the economic plight of the United States today could actually be the catalyst for another burst of get-­tough policies, as elaborated in chap­
ter 2. Furthermore, staking the future of penal reform primarily on a dollars-­and-­
cents logic is rendering life in U.S. prisons and jails even leaner and meaner as
government officials and policy makers slash corrections budgets.
Framing the problem of mass imprisonment as largely a fiscal problem (i.e., we
just cannot afford it anymore) will not sustain the political momentum needed
over the long haul to slash the prison population and dismantle the carceral state.
But the problems with the single-­minded focus on the fiscal burden of mass imprisonment run deeper than that. The fiscal imperative argument is providing a
huge political opening for the expansion of the private prison industry and for a
possible return to one of the most ignominious chapters in U.S. penal history—­
the unbridled exploitation of penal labor for profit, as discussed in chapter 3. It
has helped to bolster the conservative, neoliberal, austerity-­first view of what is
possible in American politics today. Furthermore, the fiscal approach to penal reform is wholly inadequate to tackle the wide range of problems associated with the
emergence of a tenacious carceral state that is altering how key social and political
institutions operate and perverting what it means to be a citizen in the United
States, as discussed in chapter 11. It slights the compelling civil and human rights
concerns that the carceral state raises as it removes wide swaths of historically disadvantaged groups from their neighborhoods, leaving behind devastated families
and communities and troubling questions about the fairness and legitimacy of U.S.
political institutions and the broader social order.
Chapter Summary
Chapter 2 analyzes why the financial meltdown and the Great Recession are not
likely be catalysts for the beginning of the end of mass incarceration in the United
States. It also analyzes why some of the current political and economic strains in
the United States could trigger another round of get-­tough policies. Chapter 3
shows how the new political economy of the carceral state is an impediment to
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20 | Chapter One
reversing the prison boom. It examines financing gimmicks that have kept the
true costs of the prison buildup concealed. It also analyzes important changes in
the use of penal labor and in the privatization of corrections and criminal justice.
Chapters 4 and 5 critique the three-­R approach to penal reform with its emphasis on justice reinvestment, reentry, and reducing recidivism. Chapters 6 and 7
analyze the strengths and weaknesses of framing the problem of the carceral state
as primarily a problem of racial disparities and of color-­blind racism. Chapters 8,
9, and 10 analyze how the carceral state is continuing to extend its reach with
the war on sex offenders, the war on immigrants, and the war on the “worst of
the worst,” including people serving life and other lengthy sentences. Chapter 11
scrutinizes how the carceral state is deforming key political and governing institutions at great cost to the vitality of democracy in the United States. The final
chapter sketches out an alternative political and public policy path to begin razing
the carceral state.
The Carceral State and American Politics
There really is no such thing as a politics of penal policy per se. The carceral
state must be understood within the larger political, economic, and institutional
context in which it is so deeply embedded. It is critical to examine not just the
actions and preferences of critical political actors and policy makers with respect
to penal policy, but also the objectives these actors pursue simultaneously in
other key realms of politics and economics. It also is important to situate the
problem of the carceral state within the main political and economic currents
that shape American politics and the U.S. political economy today. Using such
a broad lens brings penal policy into better focus. It reveals the competing and
contradictory views and impulses of key political actors and policy makers that
stand in the way of dismantling the carceral state. It also reveals the enormous
obstacles to forging a powerful political movement that fundamentally challenges the carceral state and other gaping political and economic inequalities in
the United States today.
The U.S. carceral state may be exceptional in its size and tenacity. But many of
the political, economic, and social forces that sustain the carceral state and stand
in the way of genuine penal reform are not. The tale of the carceral state is really
one chapter in a longer story about the huge disconnect between the breathtaking problems that grip the United States and the unwillingness or inability of the
political system to remedy them. Many of the pathologies that run through the
carceral state also run through American politics today. They include the unwarranted reverence for nonpartisanship at all costs, the uncritical acceptance of
neoliberalism in all aspects of public policy, the stranglehold that economic and
financial interests exert on politics and policy-­making, the growing political and
economic disenfranchisement of wide swaths of the population, and the gross
limitations of oppositional strategies formed primarily around identity-­based
politics.
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The Prison State | 21
Framing the problem of mass incarceration in highly economistic language has
political ramifications that extend far beyond penal policy. Hitching the movement against mass incarceration to the purported fiscal burden of the carceral
state helps reinforce the premise that eliminating government deficits and government debt should be the top national priority. Politicians and policy makers across
the board have treated shrinking government budgets as a political given rather
than as political terrain to be contested.90 This has emboldened claims that excessive spending on social programs like Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security is
the primary source of the country’s red ink, rather than the tax cuts for the wealthy
enacted under President George W. Bush, the crushing costs of the “war on terror”
and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the economic contraction sparked by
the 2008 financial meltdown.91
The fiscal frame also obscures the deeper structural problems that vex the U.S.
economy, including promiscuous globalization, excessive financialization and deregulation, and alarming economic inequalities that are hollowing out the U.S. economy and standard of living. What was once the conservative stance on what ails the
U.S. economy has become the mainstream bipartisan position, as evidenced most
pointedly by President Barack Obama’s wholesale embrace of deficit politics in 2010
despite projections from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) at the time that the
annual deficit would fall to manageable levels once the economy revived.92
We’ve been down this road before. In the early 1980s, David Stockman, President Ronald Reagan’s first budget director, admitted that the White House strategically wielded the budget deficit hysteria to slash and burn social programs, shrink
the government’s role in social welfare and other services, and further the cause
of privatization.93 Grover Norquist, one of the leaders of the Right on Crime initiative, is the nation’s foremost anti-­tax crusader and is widely known for bluntly
stating that he aims to shrink government “down to the size where we can drown
it in the bathtub.”94 Norquist’s organization, Americans for Tax Reform (ATF), was
behind the controversial Taxpayer Protection Pledge, which more than 95 percent
of the Republicans in Congress had signed as of early 2013.95
ATF is a member of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC),
which has been a leading force for decades in pushing prison construction, privat­
ization of the penal system, and punitive measures like “truth in sentencing” and
“three strikes-­and-­you’re-­out” statutes, as elaborated in chapter 3. Recently, ALEC
has been at the forefront of the assault on public-­sector unions and public schools
through the expansion of vouchers, charter schools, and online “virtual schools.”96
It also was the leading incubator of a spate of punitive legislation directed at immigrants, as elaborated in chapter 10. It has championed the controversial Stand
Your Ground gun laws, which were at the center of the national firestorm over the
February 2012 shooting death of seventeen-­year-­old Trayvon Martin in Florida.97
ALEC was forced to disband its Public Safety and Election Task Force shortly after
Martin’s death, thanks to pressure from a boycott organized by the Occupy Wall
Street movement and the Center for Media and Democracy that targeted its major
corporate funders.98
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22 | Chapter One
Today the pillars of the U.S. social welfare state, including Medicare, Medicaid,
Social Security, a vibrant labor movement, and adequately funded public schools,
are vulnerable to direct assaults from the right and to kinder, gentler jabs from
President Obama and some other leading Democrats.99 In such a political environment, it is hard to imagine that calls for justice reinvestment couched in economistic and ostensibly nonpartisan language will actually result in reallocating the tens
of billions spent annually on corrections to social and economic programs that
reduce crime and improve the lives of people residing in high-­crime communities.
Framing the carceral state primarily as an economic issue may yield some
short-­term benefits. But in the absence of more compelling arguments against the
prison buildup, it becomes that much easier to revert to funding a vast carceral
state, no questions asked, once the economy picks up.
A durable reform movement to weather the backlash that efforts to substantially reduce the incarceration rate will inevitably spark has yet to coalesce. The
budgetary and other economic problems brought on by the financial meltdown
and Great Recession do not spell the beginning of the end of mass incarceration
and the carceral state in the United States. To borrow from Winston Churchill, “It
is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”100
Criminal justice is fundamentally a political problem, not a crime and punishment or a dollars-­and-­cents problem. A huge penal system is well on its way to
becoming the new normal and a key governing institution in the United States.
Like the vast military-­industrial complex that quickly insinuated itself into the political and economic fabric in the postwar decades, the carceral state has become
integral to the U.S. polity, economy, and society in ways that we have yet to fully
acknowledge.
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